At once a testament to and a caution against “the despairing human’s capacity for ingenuity.”
After Eleutheria (2022), Hyde returns to the climate crisis with a collection of short stories that jump between dystopias and parallel universes, seamlessly blending humor and tragedy.
The book's dedication—“For who we’ll be”—immediately signposts its fundamental concern: The way humankind (and more specifically, Americans) will navigate an increasingly inhospitable climate. There’s a sublime, filmic quality to the stories, in which Hyde expertly inverts the familiar. A swarm of caravans roam America, artists are kept in glass enclosures, and rehab facilities treat digital disorders. Hyde’s preoccupation with material (duct tape, tar, fiberglass) and endless references to environmental collapse (glacial melt, phosphorus runoff, extinction) don’t hinder the stories’ unrelenting pace. Indeed, it is within the quotidian that she gestures toward the West's soporific response to the climate crisis. While the pilgrimaging caravaners of “Mobilization” obsess over refueling—dwindling resources are “probably a localized issue”—the reader grows agitated by their self-necrotizing, reckless consumption. The quintessential freedom of the American dream is continually exposed as an impossibility, the pursuit of which is entirely bound to the systems of capitalism and colonialism. In “The Future Is a Click Away,” paying for the automated convenience of “individualized commodity distribution” destroys the finances and mental wellbeing of entire communities, highlighting the impossibility of consumer free will. In the subterranean village of “The Eaters,” a celebrated historian observes that “our planet evolved on the premise of interdependence, yet human beings have insisted upon exceptionalism. No system can save us.” The gender dynamics of heteronormative relationships are skewered in “Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men,” and the fetishization of youth is exposed as essentially grotesque in “Democracy in America.” For Hyde, the U.S. is the “paradise no one could truly enter.” We're invited along on an often bizarre ride in which we see the ridiculousness of our own world reflected back at us, with Hyde managing to stress the urgency of the climate catastrophe without lecturing us.
At once a testament to and a caution against “the despairing human’s capacity for ingenuity.”Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593315262
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.
A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades.
“They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don’t know it, but they’re staring at each other.” It’s not an outtake from Hitchcock’s Rear Window but instead the wistful longings of two lonely people. Jack Baker, newly arrived in Chicago from Kansas in the 1990s, is a talented photographer who bristles when practical-minded people ask him what his work is about—to say nothing of why he works with Polaroids, which, a hipster friend reminds him, “are mass-produced, instant, cheap, impermanent.” Yes, and that’s the point, for though Jack comes from the windblown prairie, he’s pretty avant-garde. Elizabeth Augustine is a quadruple major at DePaul, “five majors if you count theater, which I have no talent for but enjoy nonetheless,” and exactly the woman Jack hoped he would meet. Life proceeds: That arty hipster becomes a real estate mogul who plants them in a development very much outside their price range until Elizabeth pulls down the big bucks from the psychological research firm that gives Hill’s latest its simple title. “Basically they were a watchdog group, a subcontractor for the FDA and FTC, sniffing out bullshit,” Hill writes, but Elizabeth, scraping by while Jack pulls down pennies as an adjunct professor, discovers that there’s hay to be made creating bullshit rather than exposing it—making airplane seats narrower, for instance, and then selling once normal-sized seats at a premium. Hill romps through our soufflélike culture with a nice sendup of academic literature and broad jabs at memes ranging from organic food (“one-hundred-percent bioavailable”) to progressive parenting, open marriage, and cult behavior (“Elizabeth knew...that the thing that most effectively strengthened and deepened delusions was being surrounded by people who shared the same delusions”) while delivering a story that suggests that while love may not conquer all, it makes a good start.
A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536117
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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